Point Pleasant (39 page)

“Jesus. Anyone hurt?”

“Dead,” Harper replied with all the nonchalance of a casual baseball fan whose home team had just lost the World Series. He looked back to the burnt husk of the building, and Ben was certain he saw a small smile flicker across Harper’s chapped lips.

Ben retreated, unsettled. He struggled toward the front of the crowd, his heart thudding in his chest in a disconnected rhythm. If he could just see Nicholas, Ben knew his anxiety would ease. Nicholas, however, was nowhere in sight.

It called twice.

“Ben Wisehart,” a female voice said behind him.

Ben faltered completely. Lily Conrad stood as stiff and straight as the shovel handle that Ben had clutched for most of the morning. She was thin, pale, and her mousy brown hair was now long and flaxen. He could still make out the traces of her freckles.

“Lily,” Ben said when he had recovered from the shock of seeing her. “Hi. Hello.”

She regarded Ben with disgust as her eyes raked over his dirty clothes and the blood on his forehead. “I heard you were back.”

“Yeah, a couple days now.”

“Funny, isn’t that when people started dying?”

“Excuse me?”

“It’s what everyone’s saying, I’m just paying you the courtesy of saying it to your face.”

The people closest to them in the crowd watched the exchange. Unease marred their features like figures in an Edvard Munch painting. At any moment, Ben expected one of them to reenact ‘The Scream.’

“So is that what you do?” Lily asked, crossing her arms. “You just come and go as you please and ruin people’s lives along the way?” Her cold glare made Ben flinch inwardly as if she had reached inside his stomach and flicked his liver with all the casual ease of a child playing a game of marbles. He had a feeling she was not just talking about the explosion or the deaths.

“Look, Lily,” he started, but she shook her head.

“I think you’ve done enough talking, don’t you?”

Ben pursed his lips.

“You should go back to wherever you came from,” she continued. “You brought this with you, you should take it back.”

Members of the crowd hummed in agreement. Ben felt like the town pariah as he realized other angry and accusing eyes had settled on him.

“This isn’t my fault,” he said, hating the defensive edge he could make out in his tone.

Lily scoffed, and some of the people around them jeered.

“Go home, city boy!” someone yelled from the crowd.

“That’s enough,” said a loud voice from the other side of the police cordon.

Relief like the first mouthful of air after surfacing from the bottom of the deep end of a swimming pool flooded through Ben at the sight of Nicholas, though it abated as he assessed the other man’s rough appearance. Patches of his uniform were stained black with ash. Nicholas’ shoulders were rigid, and his forehead seemed set in a permanent state of furrowed distress.

Out of the corner of his eye, Ben noticed Lily straighten in the sheriff’s presence. She brushed a lock of hair behind her ear and put on a smile to ease her sour demeanor, but the attempt was as convincing as a new coat of paint would have been on Jack Freemont’s tumbledown farmhouse.

Nicholas strode closer and raised his voice again. “What happened here today is a tragedy, but we need you all to go home. Everyone!” he called out loud enough that his voice carried across the crowd. “We have a hell of a clean up on our hands, and you’re all in the way. Please, return to your homes before I have my officers escort you.”

Ben took a moment to appreciate the fact that the horde had gone quiet when Nicholas started to speak. After he was finished, the townspeople dispersed and chatted amongst themselves as they walked off in different directions down Main Street.

Lily re-crossed her arms.

Nicholas stepped under the line of police tape that separated the square from the street and faced Lily. “That means you too, Miss Conrad,” he said, his voice softer but just as firm.

“You need to make him leave, Nicholas,” Lily said. “This all started when he came back.”

“Sheriff,” Nicholas corrected her. “I’m on duty.”

Ben prickled at the tension between them, but he said nothing.

Lily clenched her jaw. “Fine,” she replied. She sounded meek when she added, “Sheriff.”

Nicholas gestured to the other end of Main Street. “Go home, Miss Conrad.”

Lily refused to look at Ben when she left. Ben felt like an asshole. In all the passing years, he had never once considered how his plea that Nicholas not marry her would effect
Lily
. He never had a reason to, though. He had assumed that they had been husband and wife, after all.

Nicholas led Ben away from the cordon.

“What happened to you?” he asked, eyeing Ben’s forehead. “You’re bleeding.”

“It’s not important,” Ben replied. “What the hell happened?”

“Gazette exploded this morning,” Nicholas said. His eyes were dark and grim. “Richard Fulwell’s dead. Lizzie Collins is at County General. They don’t know if she’ll make it. Four other people were killed in the blast and even more were taken in for smoke inhalation and falling debris.”

“Fuck,” Ben whispered.

A few feet away, a smattering of spectators still lingered around the fountain. Ben noticed that Harper was one of them.

“Hey,” Nicholas called out. His booming voice caught everyone’s attention save Harper’s, who heeded only the charred buildings before him. “I said go home! I will have a deputy escort you if you’re not gone in—”

Nicholas’ threat of a police escort was interrupted when Harper climbed up onto the edge of the fountain and dragged a small Smith & Wesson from his jacket pocket.

“Drop the weapon!” Nicholas shouted. He drew his Glock from his holster and darted in front of Ben.

Ben had only a few seconds to register what was happening. The officers behind the yellow police tape also pulled their weapons at the sheriff’s yell. The townspeople who had remained by the fountain dropped to the ground, screaming at the sight of Harper’s gun.

“Harper! Drop it now!” Nicholas ordered.

Harper uttered a crude laugh. “Don’t you understand? We’re all going to die. He’s going to make sure of that.”

“NO!” Nicholas cried out as Harper put the gun to his head and pulled the trigger.

The shot echoed through the square. One of the women who had thrown herself onto the sidewalk screamed in earnest when red spattered across the concrete—and her—like runny paint on a Jackson Pollock dripping. Ben whirled away, unable to watch, when Harper’s dead body crumpled into the fountain.

“Fuck!” Nicholas shouted.

The scorched facade of the Gazette was a caustic shade of black. Ben tried to focus on it, on anything other than what he had just seen. The crimson spray of Harper’s blood caught clear and fresh in the forefront of Ben’s mind.

Daniel crossed under the police tape and rushed to the scene. Ben knew that Nicholas was no longer beside him. Some of the other officers gathered around to gawp at the scene. Ben heard Nicholas speak to one of them.

A deputy pulled Ben aside. She had a kind, open expression. Ben recognized her as the blonde officer he had seen the previous afternoon when she sped through Main Street with the windows of her cruiser rolled down.

“Come on,” she said, taking Ben’s arm. “You don’t need to see this.”

Ben let her pull him away from the square. She frowned as she peered at his forehead. “Let’s get you to the station,” she said. “I can clean that up for you. You might need a stitch or two, though.”

“I don’t think it’s that bad.”

“It looks pretty deep. Come on.”

Ben consented and followed. The station was virtually deserted given the fact that the majority of the force was out on Main Street.

The deputy led Ben through a maze of corridors to the staff’s break room. There was a basic kitchen with a fridge and coffee machine, and the countertops were lined with charging cradles for flashlights and handheld radios. The deputy nudged him toward a chair beside a table.

She pulled a bag of first aid supplies from a closet in the corner. “How’d this happen?” she asked and donned a pair of blue latex gloves she had drawn from one of the pouches on her duty belt.

“Tree branch fell,” Ben half-lied. “Hit me on the head.” He winced at the sting of the hygienic wipe she used to clean the wound.

She offered a sympathetic smile. “Have you been digging a hole to China or something?”

“No, um. Bill Tucker needed help with something on his farm. I only just came back from his place.”

“You’re a friend of Sheriff’s, right?” she asked. Ben noticed the curious expression that had crossed her face as she assessed not only the wound on his forehead but also
him
.

Ben hummed in reply.

“I’m Astrid,” she said.

Ben checked her badge, which read: Dep. A. Thomas, and he wondered if she was related to Pastor John Thomas from St. Luke’s. The same Pastor John who had delivered his mother’s eulogy and would no doubt deliver his father’s too.

“I think you’ll be fine without a stitch after all—” Astrid started, but she paused as she apparently realized that she did not know his name.

“Ben,” he supplied. “My name is Ben.”

“I’ll just bandage that up, Ben,” she said. “Lucky for you I was a candy striper in high school.”

“Lucky me,” Ben replied and tried to mimic her calm countenance.

Sarah joined them in the break room to clip a laminated visitor’s badge to Ben’s shirtfront. Her face was pallid, but she bestowed him with a weak nod and a black coffee in a paper cup.

“What a mess,” Sarah said to no one in particular.

“I guess it’s safe to say drinks at The Point for Richardson’s retirement is called off. Probably for the best. He’s a weepy drunk,” Astrid said in an attempt at levity.

“We’ll reschedule,” Sarah said. “It would be in poor taste.” She paused for a long moment and toyed with the cup of coffee she had poured for herself into a white mug with an ‘I Heart West Virginia’ slogan on the front. “People are talking about leaving town tonight.”

Astrid said nothing, but her lips tightened into a pensive frown as she secured an adhesive bandage to Ben’s forehead.

“Thank you,” Ben told her and offered a sincere smile.

“Of course. Sheriff said you should wait in his office. He wanted to speak to you,” Astrid said, and she seemed to be assessing Ben again.

“Er, where is that?” Ben asked when he realized that he had no idea where Nicholas’ office was located.

Astrid pointed down one of the long hallways. “Big one at the end there. It should be unlocked.”

“Thank you,” Ben repeated.

Astrid winked to him before she headed to the front of the station with Sarah. Ben took his coffee down the hall and paused for a second to read the name placard: Sheriff N. Nolan. He traced his right index finger over the embossed gold letters of Nicholas’ last name.

The door was unlocked. Ben entered and switched on the overhead light. It was a large office with a desk in the middle and two chairs in front of it. The desk was littered with tall stacks of paperwork and case folders.

Ben sank down into the chair on the right and placed his cup of coffee on the floor next to him. His back ached from the hours of digging, every muscle in his body seemed to scream in agony with even the smallest movement, and he had a headache the size of Mason County. He wanted to sleep and not wake up for a week. Maybe two. He pinched the bridge of his nose and closed his eyes, but he snapped them open when the image of Harper’s blood gushing out across the pale stone of the fountain flashed across his visual memory.

The laminated visitor’s badge rested awkwardly against his chest. Ben plucked it free from his t-shirt and stared down at the single word written in black Arial boldface.

Visitor
.

He tossed the badge onto the sheriff’s desk and exhaled through his nose. Maybe this
was
his fault. Maybe he should never have come back to Point Pleasant. Maybe Richard Fulwell and the others would still be alive. Maybe Andrew would still be alive. Maybe Ben should have listened when his father told him to keep his nose out of something that was simply not his business.

His hours in the forest had passed unimpeded by the dark presence that dwelled there unbeknownst to the rest of the town. Had Raziel abandoned his usual role as the protector of Point Pleasant to ensure that Ben would be guarded and safe to work and find the sigil that needed destroying? If so, did that mean Ben was partially to blame for at least five deaths so far that day?

He thought of Harper again. Ben ran a hand through his hair and wrinkled his nose at how dirty he felt. The office had a private bathroom. Ben got up and walked over to it. He flipped on the light and regarded himself in the mirror over the sink. A dark purple bruise spread from his hairline down to his eyebrow and the covered wound on his forehead.

Ben washed his hands twice to get rid of the dirt and then scrubbed his face, but he was careful not to get the bandage wet. The cool water was a comfort. He cleared the muddy mess left in the sink and returned to his seat.

There was a framed medal on the neatly organized shelf behind Nicholas’ desk. Ben squinted to read that Mayor Stewart had conferred the award for ‘extreme bravery.’

Ben smiled a little. He finished his coffee and propped the side of his head against his hand.

“Ben?” spoke a deep, gentle voice.

Ben straightened with a wince and blinked up at Nicholas. He realized he must have fallen asleep.

“Hi.”

“Hi.” Nicholas slumped in the chair to Ben’s left. He looked as tired as Ben felt. His eyes took on a glassy, dazed sheen as he gazed forward.

Ben put a hand on Nicholas’ shoulder. “You okay?”

Nicholas shook his head and stood with an abrupt jerk. He strode to the other side of the desk and sat down. Ben watched him move away and felt a pang of annoyance with the desk that now stood between them.

“Tell me what happened. Are you okay? How’s your head?”

Ben sighed at the deflection. “I’m fine, Nic.”